Abstract:

With the development of modern technologies such as virtual reality, new diseases and ailments have also begun to appear.

One of them is the so-called virtual disease, also known as simulator disease. Its effects are similar to motion sickness. It is manifested by eye pain, headache and dizziness. It occurs in some people after a session with virtual reality. The authors dealt with the study of immersion in the virtual world and noticed that some of the subjects felt discomfort. It appeared during or after a session of VR. Such people are the focus of this article. By carefully analysing biophysical data, experience in VR sessions and questionnaire replies, the authors try to determine what could have been the cause of such ill-being.

A research group was formed, which included not only employees of the Lublin University of Technology but also students. Together, both the research environment (multimedia application) as well as research scenarios were developed.

Participants of the research were asked to complete two surveys. By means of the first questionnaire carried out prior to the test, profiles of subjects were created, the second survey carried out after the research was to check whether symptoms of virtual disease were present. The duration of the test was 10 minutes, if the symptoms of the virtual disease increased, the test was stopped. The test consisted of placing the participant in a virtual reality in which simulated moving around a virtual island with uneven terrain and surrounded by water, the participant had complete control of navigation in virtual reality. The study was attended by 40 people, each person was examined two times, once in a sitting position and once in a standing position, the interval between the researches of a given person was one hour.

From the obtained research results, the relationships between the incidence of virtual disease and physical factors of participants were noted. The higher probability of the occurrence of a virtual disease was noticed in women, in people with sight defects as well as in people suffering from motion sickness. In addition, differences in the frequency of occurrence of the virtual disease were noted depending on the posture of the examined person (standing and sitting) as well as the platform they were using.

The tests were carried out using both Oculus Rift DK2 and a VR phone. In addition, an original multimedia interactive application written in Unity was used.

Keywords:

Virtual reality, virtual disease.